Louis Chilton

The idea of imposing human psychologies onto talking animals has been done to death at this point; Netflix’s BoJack Horseman would be an example of something that managed to do this with infinitely more depth, and incomparably sharper humour, than Alley Cats can muster.

The Hawk lacks Eastbound’s visual panache and its clarity of vision. Most damningly, it is just not funny.

Morrissey is terrific and terrifying across these five episodes, but Cumming is the star, a charismatic, complicated and subtly sad figure who transcends the broadness of Tip Toe’s plot.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that this would have worked better as a feature film: the pacing drags, and some of the tortuous plotting feels as if it is simply stalling for time. More annoying still is the series’ aesthetic, which is frequently so dark and colour-washed that it’s hard to tell what you’re even looking at.

It makes very little effort to justify its own existence – refreshing, perhaps, for a franchise that has too often treated its subject matter with stodgy self-importance, but ultimately frustrating. It is a character piece without a sufficiently interesting character at its core.

In a vacuum, The Light in the Hall would be a perfectly fine, if a little overwrought, small-town crime drama. The problem is, we’ve seen it all before.

Sometimes you want a puzzle you just don’t have to think about – and as escapist pap goes, you could do worse than this.

There’s no denying that parts of Kaos are compelling – stories don’t endure for millennia if they aren’t, fundamentally, a good old yarn. But the series strains at points under the weight of its arch, high-concept premise. It might not all be Greek to me – but some of it definitely was.

While it takes a few episodes for House of the Dragon to crescendo into the sort of grand, violent spectacle that the series (and its predecessor) does better than pretty much anything else on TV, there are enough nuggets of incident in the opening couple of hours to satisfy viewers’ bloodlust.

Between Downey’s character-juggling, the constantly time-skipping narrative structure, and a snappy, hair gel-slick aesthetic sensibility, it would be easy to write off The Sympathizer as being more style than substance. But make no mistake, this is a series that is really about something, that tackles expansive subject matter with clarity and verve.